SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (4 page)

So basically you start out by doing practice parts of a test, or even entire practice tests. You can do these practice sections with or without time limits, as you see fit (of course, the actual SAT will have a time limit, so you’ll probably want to practice with a time limit at some point, but it might not be beneficial in the beginning).

I wouldn’t recommend that you use practice sections or practice tests until you’ve made some progress in understanding the rules and patterns of the individual SAT questions—otherwise, you’ll just end up wasting lots of time and getting frustrated when you miss a lot of questions and don’t understand why.

I also wouldn’t recommend that you do practice tests or sections without doing a full post-mortem on them, in which you go through all the questions and try to understand why the College Board wrote each question the way it did, what you could have done to answer the question correctly as quickly and directly as possible, and what lessons you can learn from that question that might be applicable to future questions. This post-mortem step is absolutely critical if you want to make a serious improvement on the SAT, but it’s something that most people completely ignore, or do only halfway.

Since the whole point of your practice sessions is to prepare you to do well on test day, the most important thing you can learn from any question is how to recognize its rules and patterns at work in future questions. In other words, as weird as it may sound, the actual answer to a particular practice question doesn’t really matter that much; what matters is whether the question can teach us how to answer future questions on test day. So it’s much better to miss a practice question and learn something from it than to get lucky on a practice question and not learn anything.

And if you don’t really sit and think about the questions you’ve missed, you’re going to keep missing similar questions in the future—maybe not questions that seem similar on the surface (there may not even be any that seem similar on the surface), but you’ll definitely miss questions with similar fundamentals, and there will probably be a lot of them.

So please make sure you give some serious thought to your practice sections after you finish them. Otherwise, the time you spend doing them is basically wasted. (By the way, if you do a good job on your post-mortems you should find that you dramatically reduce the amount of practice that you need to reach your goal, so you save yourself a ton of time in the long run.)

In this exercise, which can be part of a post-mortem or just an exercise on its own, you look at some real SAT questions for which you already know the answers. If you’ve already done the questions and graded them, then you’ll know the answers from that; if you haven’t, then just look at the answer key and mark them down beforehand anyway.

Our goal with this exercise is not to figure out the right answer to a question, but to figure out the fastest and easiest way to arrive at that answer with certainty. For a Passage-Based Reading Question, we want to figure out which phrases in the text support the correct answer, and we want to figure out how we could have arrived at those key phrases with a minimal amount of reading and frustration. For a Math question, we might think about ways to use diagrams or answer choices (if the question has some) to avoid using formulas in our solutions. And so on.

This abbreviation stands for “What Would Make It Right?” In this drill, you go through each answer choice in a question and ask yourself what would have to change about the question or the test for that answer choice to be the correct one. If a Math question asks for the area of a rectangle and one wrong answer is the perimeter, then the answer to “WWMIR” is something like “if the College Board had asked for perimeter instead of area here.” If the shortest answer choice in an Improving Sentences question isn’t correct, then the answer to “WWMIR” might be something like “if this noun had been singular instead of plural, or if the word ‘it’ had been ‘they.’” And so on. Forcing yourself to try to re-imagine the questions in ways that would make the wrong answers right will help reinforce your understanding of how right and wrong answers work for particular parts of the SAT.

As I mentioned above, years of working with a wide variety of students have left me convinced that there is no single best schedule for every test-taker. In fact, I think it would be closer to the truth to say that no two test-takers would probably have the same optimal preparation schedule. So now that we’ve talked about general ideas to use in your preparation, let’s talk about the things you’ll need to think about when you schedule that preparation.

Imagine that you’re in a history class, and the teacher announces a massive research assignment that will be due in 2 months. There are two general reactions to a situation like this: some people rush home and start working on it right away, and some people already know that they’ll pull a couple of all-nighters right before it’s due and knock it out like that. I find that the same general tendencies exist when it comes to test prep. If you’d get started on a 2-month project when the due date is still 2 months away, then you should probably start as early as possible on your test preparation. If you’re more of a last-minute person, then you’re probably more of a last-minute prepper, too. I’ve seen both approaches work out very well tons of times, as long as the test-taker was comfortable with the particular approach.

Some people have longer attention spans than others, and some are just naturally more interested in the SAT than others. If you really can’t coax more than 10 to 30 minutes of sustained attention to the test out of yourself, then you’ll probably want to do shorter and more frequent bouts of preparation. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who can easily spend 2 hours thinking about the SAT without wanting to scream, it may make more sense for you to do an hour or two each weekend and largely ignore the test during the week.

This one is probably obvious: the more points you need to score, the earlier you’ll probably want to start prepping.

Again, fairly obvious: the less free time you have in your schedule, the earlier you need to start prepping in order to accommodate a particular amount of prep time. (But one potential wrinkle in this part of the discussion is the fact that the actual amount of prep time you need may be significantly more or significantly less than you’d expect at the outset.)

It may come as a surprise, but there is no magic number of practice questions that will guarantee you hit your target score. Based on my fairly wide experience, I would say that over 99% of people do need to do some kind of actual practice work with the ideas in this book—it’s very rare that a person is able to implement the strategies on test day with full effectiveness after merely reading about them. So you will want to do some number of practice questions or sections. The operative question is how many.

And the issue is one of quality, not quantity. Most people will assume (very incorrectly) that if they simply do a certain number of questions they’re guaranteed to improve. But that really isn’t the case, because of the unique way in which standardized tests are designed. It’s much more important to try to
understand
a representative sample of questions than it is to crank out a million repetitions simply for its own sake. If you can look at a single real SAT and really, thoroughly understand what the College Board is doing in that test, and why, and how you can use the strategies in this book to beat it, then you’re ready.

Finally, I’d like to close by pointing out that a specific test-prep schedule might not even be ideal for you in the first place. In my experience, students are often very bad at predicting how long it will take them to master a particular skill on the SAT, because the SAT is so different from traditional tests. You may pick up the Reading very quickly and take longer to build good SAT Math skills, or the other way around, and there may not be any correlation between those lengths of time and your academic strengths. Or you might rapidly build up good test-taking instincts for all the question types, and then have a difficult time eliminating your “careless mistakes” and spend weeks perfecting that. You may be full of enthusiasm and excitement one week, and then suddenly find yourself with no time at all on the next week. And so on. An overly rigid schedule may prevent you from adapting to these kinds of situations, or to others.

My general “scheduling” advice, then, is simple. If I were you, I would try to start prepping as early as you can, even if that just means flipping absent-mindedly through this Black Book in the very beginning. The earlier you start, the more gradual the prep can be, and the more likely it is to stick. At the same time, I would recommend prepping in ways that you find mentally engaging, and taking breaks when it gets boring and counter-productive. After every practice section or full-length practice test, I would
strongly
recommend a serious and sincere post-mortem.

And that’s basically it. Modify it and make it your own as you see fit.

“All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.”
- Leonardo da Vinci

A lot of test-takers try to assess their weaknesses with some kind of diagnostic test, whether from the College Board itself or from a tutor or test prep company. In fact, the score report you receive from the College Board after you take an official SAT or PSAT provides a breakdown of your supposed strengths and weaknesses based on the questions that you missed.

In my opinion, you want to be very careful when you consider this kind of feedback, because it overlooks the fact that there are many, many ways to miss any given SAT question, and they might not have anything to do with the College Board’s idea of the question’s type.

For instance, you might miss a reading question because you don’t know some of the words in the question, or you might miss it because you misread the question, or because you were in a hurry and didn’t have time to consider it carefully enough. You might miss a math question for any of the same reasons, or because you made a simple mistake in the arithmetic component of an algebra question, or because you keyed something into the calculator incorrectly. And so on. But diagnostic reports can’t measure the reasons that you miss things—they can only try to classify each question and then assume that people who miss a question are bad at answering questions of that class.

For instance, the score report might show that you missed a question that it considers to be an algebra question, and recommend that you improve your algebra as a result. But it may turn out that you really missed the question because you accidentally multiplied 2 and -2 and got 4, which has nothing to do with algebra.

So I rarely pay any attention to such diagnostic reports, and I don’t encourage my students to worry about them in most cases. The only limited exception I would make would be in an extreme case. For example, if you miss every single Sentence Completion question on a practice test and don’t miss any other questions in the Critical Reading section, then there’s a good chance that you need to work on your approach to Sentence Completion questions.

Outside of those kinds of situations, though, I would recommend that you pay more attention to your own feelings about where your weak areas are, as long as you’re trying to diagnose those weaknesses honestly. For instance, it’s tempting to look at an SAT Math question that involves circles and assume that you missed it because you’re not good with circles, but, if you pay close attention to how you tried to answer the question, you may realize that you actually missed it because you ignored two of the answer choices and didn’t notice that the diagram was drawn to scale. Either way, the experience of looking back over a question you missed and trying to figure out why the correct answer is correct, and how you might have arrived at that correct answer if you had looked at the question differently, is far more helpful than accepting a diagnostic report at face value.

“One must learn by doing the thing.”
- Sophocles

Three of the most important themes in this book, which you’ll see reflected on almost every level of my SAT advice, are the following:

o
SAT questions are written according to specific rules and patterns, and

o
learning to beat the SAT is a matter of learning to identify those rules and patterns and exploit their inherent weaknesses systematically, because

o
most of the problems that most people have on the SAT are the result of poor test-taking skills, not of deficiencies in subject-matter knowledge.

I
’ll expand on these ideas in the rest of this book, but for right now I want to impress something upon you that is extremely, extremely important: It is absolutely critical that you practice with real SAT questions written by the actual College Board itself, and not with any other kind of practice test or practice questions.

Only the real questions written by the actual College Board are guaranteed to behave like the questions you’ll see on test day. Questions written by other companies (Kaplan, Princeton Review, Barron’s, or anybody else) are simply not guaranteed to behave like the real thing. In some cases, the differences are obvious, and, frankly, shocking. Some companies write fake practice SAT Writing questions in which the passive voice is the difference between a right answer and a wrong answer. Some fake SAT Math questions rely on math formulas the SAT doesn’t allow itself to test. Many fake SAT Reading questions require literary analysis. And so on.

Fake practice questions that break the rules of the real test will encourage you to develop bad test-taking habits, and will keep you from being able to develop good habits. For our purposes, then, fake SAT questions written by any company except the College Board are garbage. They are useless. If you want to learn how to beat the SAT, you have to work with real SAT questions.

Real SAT questions from the actual College Board are pretty easy to acquire. You can find
some on the College Board’s website, but the most common source is the College Board’s “Blue Book,”
The Official SAT Study Guide
. I keep a page with the best deals on the Blue Book here:
http://www.SATprepBlackBook.com/blue-book
.

The second edition of the Blue Book has ten practice tests in it, which should be more than enough for anybody if you use them correctly. See the section of this book called “How To Train For The SAT” for more on that.

One of the most common objections to the idea of using real test questions is that some companies (most notably Barron’s) are known for writing practice questions that are harder than real test questions—the argument is that working with more difficult questions will make the real test seem like a breeze.

Unfortunately, this approach is too clever for its own good, because it overlooks the nature of difficulty on a test like the SAT. If the “harder” practice questions from a third-party company were “hard” in the same way that “hard” SAT questions are “hard,” then training with harder question might be a good idea. But those fake questions are harder in a way that makes them totally unlike real questions, so they’re a waste of time.

When a third-party company writes fake questions to be hard, it does so by incorporating some of the skills that a high-school student would need to use in advanced classes: knowledge of advanced math concepts, subtle literary analysis, and so on. But these skills have no place whatsoever on the SAT, because the SAT limits itself to very basic ideas, and tries to fool you by asking you about basic things in weird ways.

So if you want to raise your SAT score, the skill you need to develop is the ability to look at strange questions, figure out whatever basic thing they actually want you to do, and then do it. That’s what this Black Book teaches you to do. In fact, the more familiar you become with the SAT, the more you’ll see that “hard” SAT questions aren’t really any different from “easy” ones when you get right down to it. This is why it’s pointless to use fake questions, even if they’re supposed to be more challenging than real questions.

Whenever students ask whether they should use “harder” questions to get ready for the SAT, I always answer with this analogy: It’s true that performing on the flying trapeze is harder than making an omelet, but getting better at the trapeze won’t make your omelets any better, because the two things have nothing to do with each other. Just because something is harder doesn’t mean it’s helpful.

I really can’t stress this enough: If you’re serious about improving your performance, you need to practice with real SAT questions written by the College Board, because real test questions are what you’ll see on test day. There are no exceptions to this.

(I frequently have students who try to ignore this particular aspect of my SAT-taking approach, and the results are always bad. Seriously. Trust me on this. Use real questions from the College Board. There’s a reason I keep repeating this idea :) )